If at all possible try one out before you by to figure out what you do and don't like about a kayak. We tried out Cachestacker's before we bought ours and realized that what he had was too short for Stan to stretch out his legs, so when we bought ours we sat in a few in the store and decided which one would work for him. My legs are short enough that probably just about any would work for me, so I wasn't the issue. We purchased good seats with good back support. We also got good advice on picking out a paddle at the store. I also got a very comfortable PFD that had no price on it and it was the last one, so they sold it to me for $8, which was a steal for the type that I have.

Yes, a cacher who will not be named brought it sheepishly to the event and said his wife had it in a drawer for several years and he just found out, so he passed it on to Team Cull who was trading TBs, so maybe now it will move again. I'm Team Cull's witness that he wasn't the one that had it for all of these years. LOL.

I personally don't have a problem with finding puzzle caches no matter how you obtained the coordinates (ie. solved or were given the solution). It's more gratifying if you've solved it yourself, but some people just don't like them but would like to either clear their area or know where the puzzles exist to be able to hide other caches in the area. I'm lucky that Stan enjoys solving the puzzles, so now we have a ton of puzzles solved that will probably disappear before we ever get around to going after them, so if someone else can benefit from our time of solving them so be it. We were also able to help someone else clear off a lot of puzzles off of HC's longest not found list because all of the puzzle people had found the puzzle caches a long time ago, so no new finds were going to happen on them most likely without the push of giving someone solutions. As far as giving credit to the person that gave you the solutions, that can be a sticky situation. It's a no win situation. If you give the credit, you risk the cache owner possibly being upset with you for not finding it the "right way". If you don't give credit, you risk upsetting the person that gave you the solutions. I do not get upset if we are not given credit for giving out a solution, and I also think that most of the puzzle cache owners in our area are such social people that they are brainstorming ideas until someone comes up with a solution and going as a group to go retrieve the new caches so don't let it bother them as to how others find their caches after the FTF is claimed.
We do use GSAK to filter out caches with 2DNFs in the last 4 finds. We may miss some that are really out there by doing so, but with millions of caches out there, missing out on a few here or there is no big deal. We used to view it as a challenge to find caches that previously someone else couldn't find, but now with time being so limited and caches being so prolific we can afford to be much pickier and go for caches that are going to give us a greater chance of actually finding something for our efforts. I no longer have any goals of clearing out my area, which in the early days was always a goal (which we were pretty good at achieving).
Cache on and don't let your egos or what other people are doing or not doing get in the way of you having fun.
As for the German armchair cachers, let them stay at home in their armchairs and just get fat never seeing anything interesting other than their inflated numbers on their computer screen.

Geocoins tend to not move from cache to cache and end up in someone's personal collection. A cute travelbug tag would have a better chance of moving from cache to cache. I'm not putting a thumb drive from a cache into my computer and risking a virus because who knows what could happen to it in the cache.. Maybe just provide a business card with a link in the geocache or do some promotion attached to one of the bigger events rather than a physical geocache and then you could control the distribution (ie. keep one or two people from getting all of the contents of the cache rather than sharing). I like that you are wanting to involve the geocaching communtiy. Good luck however you decide to do your promotion..

As long as my find is still logged once, I certainly would appreciate the CO deleting my extra duplicates. I've had it happen when I'm logging from my phone on the road where I don't have good cell coverage. I usually can't easily get back in to delete the extra until I'm back in civilization. If the cache owner has already taken care of it for me, then they make my life easier. I certainly don't expect them to have to do this for me if they are not so inclined though.

It's been so long since we've seen just about anyone on the southeast side of town due to most of the events being during the week and it just being too far to make them. Bob will be missed. Like Heftydude, I think about the Quidditch event he hosted. That was definitely a unique one.